Biscuit Filmworks is a project that stands in contrast to many of the tendencies in contemporary commercial spaces in Los Angeles. Both Shubin and Donaldson and the client were looking to design a space that was more modest, forgiving, and broken in; a place for making comfortable creative work.

Shubin + Donaldson began with the adaptive reuse of two warehouse buildings; thinking of them as found objects and proceeded to gut them, tie them together, and create a new structure inside this grafted condition. The relationship between the new construction and existing buildings achieves a complex and nuanced order that attempts to blend the new and old in a way that is not easily distinguishable. This sense of blending also comes from the materiality of the project; using reclaimed wood, handmade tile, ribbed glass, and board-formed concrete, the architect was able to achieve not only a range of textures and sources but an industrious spirit that speaks to the company’s philosophical learnings as a factory for doing.

This design trajectory was to be seen as an emerging philosophy on how we design for creative companies in an evolving digital world, and how these environments begin to blur the distinction between the comforts of home and the stress of work.